ST. LOUIS — Rob Cerfolio was in the same position as a lot of recent college graduates when he completed his undergraduate degree at Yale University.
Now what?
Through those college years, the plan had been for Cerfolio to go on to medical school. His father was a surgeon. His mother had been a nurse. His grandfather had been a surgeon.
“That was really kind of all I knew,” Cerfolio said.
A phone call from his college baseball coach, former Cardinal John Stuper, and randomly seeing a job listing online from the Cleveland Guardians changed the direction of Cerfolio’s career path.
“It was complete dumb luck,” Cerfolio said. “Stuper had reached out to me asking if I had ever thought about trying the front office side of things. He got me in contact with Mike Elias (who also had played for Stuper before going on to become the general manager of the Orioles).
“He gave me a little intel on what that looked like and I was like, ‘That could be interesting.’”
Cerfolio had completed the MCAT exam, and had applied to a couple of medical schools, when the job listing from the Guardians popped up on his computer.
“I just stumbled upon the Guardians job online,” Cerfolio said. “It was an organization I had heard really good things about, how they conduct their business, the type of people they have. For some reason they brought me in and kept bringing me back every year.”
When Cerfolio joined the Guardians as an intern in 2015, the plan was still to go to medical school. He was accepted by a couple of schools but was able to defer his start day while completing his internship.
A conversation with his father helped Cerfolio decide that he wanted to pursue a career in baseball instead of in the medical world.
“It was after my intern year and I was trying to use his advice and experience to figure out where I was going to go in this whole thing,” Cerfolio said. “During that conversation I remember him asking me, ‘How happy are you waking up every day and contributing toward what you are doing?’
“I remember thinking about that question and being really energized about the kinds of things I was working on. At that point I was very much doing whatever it took to have an opportunity — getting people coffee, it didn’t matter to me. I wanted to show up and be a part of a team and compete. Those were the parts of the job that I love.”
Cerfolio turned down the medical school invitations and launched a career that a decade later brought him into the front office of the Cardinals, hired on Oct. 22 as the team’s assistant general manager in charge of player development and performance.
It’s been a quick rise for the 32-year-old Cerfolio, a journey that began when he was being recruited by Stuper and Yale from his home in Alabama.
“Playing the game the right way”
Having been a product of the Cardinals’ farm system, where he was tutored by George Kissell and Whitey Herzog among other legendary instructors and coaches, Stuper developed a passion for the game that led him to being hired as the coach at Yale in 1993.
“The Cardinal Way” meant something to Stuper during his playing career in the 1980s and it’s a philosophy that stayed with him throughout his three decades at Yale.
“I don’t know if I remember the very first time I heard him use that exact language but I know on my recruiting trip as a 16 or 17-year-old trying to figure out where I was going to go for four years to play baseball he talked about the winning culture that the Cardinals are and have always been,” Cerfolio said. “I just thought it was a really cool set of experiences that he had — a lot of what he ultimately tried to preach at the team level when I was playing for him.
“He was all about playing the game the right way; a bunch of guys there for the organization more than they were there just for the name on the back of the jersey.”
At the time, Cerfolio — a lefthanded pitcher — was thinking more about his own playing career than a possibility that his future might be working in a team’s front office. He was drafted by the Dodgers in the 33rd round in 2013 following his junior season but didn’t sign, then hurt his arm and didn’t pitch as a senior the following year.
“Rob was the kind of a guy who was a killer on the mound,” said Green Campbell, one of his teammates. “He was as intense of a competitor as I ever played with. You knew if it was game day and Cerf was on the mound we had a chance to win no matter who we were playing.
“He is the kind of guy who always rises to the occasions and I mean that sincerely. We could be playing the number one team in the country and if he was on the bump we had a chance to win, not because he threw the hardest or had the nastiest stuff but just because of how great a competitor he was.”
Campbell, and another teammate, Kevin Fortunato, who was one of Cerfolio’s roomates, also saw a skill developing in Cerfolio which they knew would make him successful in whatever career he decided to pursue.
“When he was pitching, if a ball was kicked around on the infield, he would be the first guy to say, ‘Let’s get the next one and I’ve got you’,” Fortunato said. “He was amazing at that. His mental side was always the most impressive aspect of his game.
“No one will ever say a bad thing about him … He’s going to relate to everyone. He’s super smart. He can relate to the players and the front office, which makes him good at his job. He’s just a dynamite guy.”
Fortunato and Cerfolio remained close after college; Fortunato spoke at his wedding. The two often talk now about the challenges of parenthood, as well as their jobs.
“I work in finance and I met him in Philadelphia for a game this summer and I brought our largest investor to meet him because the guy loves baseball and wanted to meet Rob,” Fortunato said. “We talked a lot about the mental side of the game and the books he reads and what he implements.
“If you ever spent time with his dad you would get it right away. He’s big on mental fortitude and big on competing. It’s more important than the talent side of things.”
That was one of the traits of the Guardians which Stuper admired. Now retired and living in Florida, Stuper said watching the Guardians play reminded him of the Cardinals’ teams of his era.
“If you watch how the Guardians play, they do things like old school teams at times like hit and runs, squeeze plays,” Stuper said. “ They don’t act like other teams act.”
Having been promoted over the years to become the director of player development, Cerfolio — Stuper knew — had a direct role in seeing that the game was taught that way to the players in the Guardian’s farm system.
He was happy for Cerfolio — and was even more excited one night a few weeks ago when he was at home and his phone received an incoming text message.
“A really good fit”
Cerfolio wanted to let Stuper know that he had been contacted by the Cardinals and Chaim Bloom, another Yale graduate, in their search to hire a new assistant general manager.
“I really see a lot of the Cardinals in the Guardians and that’s why I see Cerf as a really good fit,” Stuper said. “I think one of the reasons they are bringing him in is to kind of modernize the organization. I think he’s a really nice combination of kind of old-school with that modernization. I think the two can co-exist.
“I don’t think analytics should be the be-all and end-all but I think it should be a tool in your toolbox. I think that’s what Cerf will bring to the organization.
“I’m excited for him. Elias began as a Cardinals scout and I am in touch with him a lot. Now I’ve got another guy with the Birds on the Bat and I am really excited about that. I know he’s really good at his job and he’s an amazing guy.
“Rob is one of the best people who ever walked through the doors of my clubhouse.”
Despite the offer from the Cardinals, it was not an easy decision for Cerfolio to leave the Guardians. He liked his job, he liked the people he worked with, he liked the challenge of trying to build a team that could win the World Series.
“At least for me, any time you’ve been working on a project for 10 years; the amount of staff members I helped hire or recruit to what we were trying to accomplish there,” Cerfolio said. “It’s the people you build connections and relationships with that made it such a difficult decision, in a good way.
“It’s also exciting to think about the chance to do that that same thing here with the Cardinals.”
Cerfolio also spent time talking with Fortunato about the decision, and what it would mean to uproot his family — wife Jaime and young son Cooper — and move from their home in Cleveland to a new city.
“We talked a lot about it,” Fortunato said. “You put so much effort into something, and he had a great run. He was at the point now where he had developed all of the talent on field at the major-league level. He was really excited about what they had built and it was natural to want to see it through.
“But with the Cardinals, it goes back to the opportunity. This isn’t pick a club, a random program. It’s the Cardinals. He had just built a house. He has a young child. He met his wife out there. He had a lot of roots. But it just speaks to the opportunity.”
The excitement of the challenge
Ultimately, it was the excitement of the challenge that convinced Cerfolio to accept the Cardinals’ offer. Once the beacon of how an organization was supposed to be run, the Cardinals’ farm system had lost its way. Too many of the teachers and coaches had retired, or jobs were eliminated and didn’t return following the pandemic.
With the backing of ownership and Bloom, who will succeed John Mozeliak as the team’s president of baseball operations after next season, Cerfolio will get the chance to set the blueprint for the future of the organization.
His goal, in simple terms, is to help rebuild “The Cardinal Way.”
He will be relying heavily on the lessons he first learned at Yale from Stuper, the ones he worked to implement with the Guardians.
“Those years playing for Stuper were really informative,” Cerfolio said. “What I saw was the sense of unity as a team and really pushing yourself beyond your comfort level to try to get better as a player.
“I’m really proud of what we were able to accomplish (in Cleveland) although I wish we had played a little better the last week; some of the things we tried to instill in the culture at the team level and the best in class in how we were thinking about our development effort with what we put in front of players and how we were always trying to find the thing that was most unique to them to help them get to the big leagues and help us win.”
Cerfolio has spent his first weeks with the Cardinals trying to get an understanding of the organization, believing that knowing the way it has worked in the past can only help as he forms his ideas and plans for the future.
The immediate task is to hire a farm director and a team director of performance, positions that will report directly to him. The next order of business will be to fill out the minor-league staff with coordinators, instructors, managers and coaches, as well as identifying the necessary technology upgrades.
“I want to know what the people here think is working well and where are the areas for opportunities moving forward,” Cerfolio said. “I think it’s really hard to do all of that overnight. I want to have a good understanding of where things are today and how I can use my experiences from Cleveland. What are the things we need to do to build great athletes and great players who hopefully will reach the majors and help us win.”
One of the reasons Stuper is excited to have one of his players in charge of that work for the Cardinals is that he sees Cerfolio as the perfect person to blend the old-school and new-school approach.
“I’d like to think so,” Cerfolio said. “There are certainly things I believe in in both buckets. I think you have to pull those two elements together and bring in staff that have those values. Ultimately you are trying to build a team that wants to learn and grow – helping create a room full of people that want to learn from each other and service the player. That’s ultimately why we are here.
“I think that’s really the fun part of the job – to get the right people who think along the same lines.”
Follow Rob Rains on X @robrains
